John 6:24-35 "There is Bread....and There is Bread"

            Just about every grocery store in the US that I have ever frequented has almost a whole aisle devoted to bread.  In the Millcreek Shaw’s where I take my mother food shopping every week, it begins right after the peanut butter and jelly.  It starts with the bagels and English muffins and then marches forward into the specific loaf brands – Arnold, Pepperidge Farm, Nissen, the store brand – and then it self-divides into the different kinds of bread within each brand – from Pepperidge Farm cinnamon raisin swirl to Shaw’s 7 grain to Arnold whole wheat, then onward to the white, rye, pumpernickel, and more.  And it all ends with the hamburger and hot dog buns.

            And that is only the bread aisle.  We must not forget the bakery section – with its enormous muffins, more bagels, French baquettes, dinner rolls, sub rolls, peasant loaves, organic bread, Pigs that Fly bread, and all the seasonal breads from challah to hot cross buns. 

            No matter who we are, we in this congregation do not suffer a shortage of bread – and that is part of the reason why the power of this passage in the Gospel of John can be easily lost on us. When it comes to the ease with which we can chow down,  we are very different from the people who followed the man Jesus and to whom Jesus directed his message of good news. 

            The verses we read this morning pick up after the story of the feeding of the 5000, where Jesus managed to assuage the hunger of a whole bunch of people gathered on a hillside with a few fish and a couple of small loaves of bread and still ended up with 12 baskets of leftovers.  These were the people who did not reliably get three square meals a day.  They were the ones whom Jesus was thinking about in the prayer that has made its way down through the ages to us – “give us this day our daily bread.”  That petition had a very particular meaning to those who first heard it.

            There were no French baquettes for these men and women, no cinnamon raisin swirl, pumpernickel or rye (even Jewish rye), no hamburger or hotdog buns.  In fact, if one were cynical, one could make a case that a lot of those people who followed Jesus around the lake and ended up in Capernaum where we meet them again this morning were merely hanging around for another free handout.

          Or perhaps (thinking about the passage less cynically) they had experienced recent times like an American woman who wrote this:  "In Haiti] I have seen a little girl try to ease her hunger by eating dirt. When I approached her, she covered her lips to conceal the mouthful of grit and pebbles, but tiny telltale stones glistened on her lips and chin.”  Or this – “I just wish we could set a table for the little Haitian boy who cried in my arms last night.  I asked him why he looks so sad. He burst into tears, eyes full of pain, and whispered, 'I'm hungry.' “

            Unlike we who experience an abundance of bread every time we walk into a supermarket and so perhaps have lost a sense of the relationship between bread and survival, the people to whom Jesus spoke were more like the 925 million people in the world today who are by definition going hungry.   Unlike us, they were acutely and viscerally aware of the bread-survival connection. 

            In fact, bread had factored into the history of the people who followed Jesus that day from their very beginning.  After all, the Hebrew people had left Egypt in such a hurry that they had been forced to bake their daily bread without yeast on flat stones in the desert sun – hence the matzo we serve at our Seder Meal during Holy Week each year before Easter. 

            And when the Hebrews had no bread as they wandered for forty years in the wilderness, God sent them manna from heaven to eat each day.  And did you know that the Hebrews had ended up in Egypt in the first place because they had to leave their own land due to a famine, once again unable to feed themselves?

            You see, the people who pursued Jesus around the lake that day understood that bread was their lifeline.  And here was a rabbi who had provided it to them. 

            “Hey, when did you get here?” they inquired when they finally linked up with Jesus again in Capernaum. 

            And so the context is established for the gospel writer to weave together a marvelous conversation between Jesus and this group of, if not physically hungry now then inevitably soon-to-be hungry, women and men. 

            The crowd speaks from its collective empty stomach while Jesus wants to talk about God. “And back and forth it goes: there’s the food that perishes and there’s the food that endures for eternal life; there’s manna for the wilderness, given not by Moses but by God to the Hebrew people—and then there’s bread from heaven that gives life to the world; there’s the food that we work to put on the table, and then there’s the food that God works to give us; there’s the bread that never satisfies for long, and then there’s the bread that satisfies forever so that we are never hungry again.”  (from “The Bread of Life”)  There is bread – and there is bread.

         The dialogue morphs and blends between physical hunger and spiritual hunger.  As Lutheran Biblical scholar Ginger Barfield writes, “"In this text, Jesus is trying to repair the faulty understanding the crowd took away from last Sunday's text."  To that end, it is about more than bread for the body.  It is also about bread for the soul.  It is about the outrageous and amazing words that the Gospel writer puts into the mouth of Jesus when the rabbi proclaims:  “Just as bread is your physical lifeline, so I am your lifeline too…I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

            In the end, Jesus seems to say, there is something even more debilitating than physical hunger, and that is spiritual hunger.  Ah – now that kind of hunger I think we can relate to.  Mother Theresa once said, “The spiritual poverty of the Western World is much greater than the physical poverty of our people…You, in the West, have millions of people who suffer such terrible loneliness and emptiness. They feel unloved and unwanted. These people are not hungry in the physical sense, but they are in another way. They know they need something more than money, yet they don’t know what it is”

            Which one of us has not experienced that sort of hunger? Which one of us has not found ourselves running on empty?  Perhaps we have no place to set down roots, no place to really call home.  Perhaps we feel so lonely even in the midst of those we call our friends and family.  Perhaps our mother, father, spouse, best friend has passed away.  Perhaps we feel so stressed and strung out by work.  Perhaps we feel so broken down, so unloved, so aware of the pain of the world around us and so tired that we do not know where to begin to fix it.  

            Perhaps, in the midst of our affluence, in the midst of baquettes and buns, pumpernickel and rye, in the midst of all that we are told we need, we hunger for more - for love, for meaning, for someone to walk the way with us, for someone to show us the way in the first place, for a way – just a way - to leave those pangs of pain and hunger – deep hunger – behind.

            And so some of us drink.  Some of us smoke dope or snort cocaine.  Some of us bury ourselves in work – or social networking.  Some of us eat.  However, both Jesus – and Mother Theresa - agree that those behaviors will not work.  They will not solve the problem.

            “What they are missing, really, is a living relationship with God.”  That is what Mother Theresa says.  “The person who aligns with me hungers no more and thirsts no more, ever.”   That is what Jesus says. 

            There we have it – in a nutshell – in a loaf of bread:  the challenge and the calling of the church.  The church is meant to be a safe place for people to seek that living relationship with God and to align with the one who assuages our deep spiritual hunger and thirst. 

            The church is meant to be a place where you and I are constantly challenged to alleviate or at least to lessen the hunger we see in all its forms all around us. 

            The church is meant to be a place where we understand that we are called to hold in our arms the boy who weeps from hunger and to wipe clean the mouth of the girl who can only eat dirt. 

            The church is meant to be a place where we are both called and challenged to live such lives of service.  Why?  Because we seek to be aligned with Jesus, the Bread of Life, and so more deeply connected to God.

            Today, as happens each month, we are reminded not only of our deep spiritual hunger and our commitment to diminish the hunger of those around us.  We are also reminded of that connection, that lifeline which bread has come to symbolize in the Christian Church.  And so today we prepare for a feast.   We prepare for that time to reconnect with the Bread of Life.

            As the author of the blog Magdalene’s Musings writes, “Every month we lay the table for a meal, and it’s funny kind of a meal. A tiny piece of bread—or more, if you can tear it off yourself and are hungry for a larger hunk. A small sip of juice, or whatever your bread can soak up. A funny, tiny, almost insignificant kind of a meal….That is the custom we carry forward today. Bread that is so much more than bread. Fruit of the vine that is so much more than the fruit of the vine. Food that is so much more than food, because it draws our attention beyond the food to the creator of the food. A meal that is simultaneously so much less than a meal (as defined by our super-sized appetites), and yet so much more than a meal (as defined by the love of the one who serves it to us).”

            There is food and there is food.  That is what Jesus is telling us in this passage.  There is food for the body and food for the soul.  And, oh, we so need food for the soul. Not so much to bring us comfort – though comfort is good when it happens.  Not so much even to bring us personal peace, though peace also is good when it happens.  But to bring us into a vibrant, living, breathing relationship with God – and in the end to align ourselves with the One who calls and challenges us to dare to follow his Way. 

            And so in great high hope, we gather around the table we have set  – hungry for bread, hungry for the bread of life.  Come, for all things are ready.